ok so i got my technician license about three weeks ago and ive been trying to use the local 2m repeater that the club put in the repeater directory. i can hear people on it just fine but when i try to transmit nobody seems to hear me or respond. someone at the club mentioned CTCSS tones but i dont really understand what that is or how to set it up on my baofeng. like is this why nobody can hear me? i feel like im missing something obvious here.

also separate question kind of — when i do manage to get on a repeater and someone is already in the middle of a conversation, do i just wait or is there a way to let them know im listening? i sat there for like 20 minutes the other night waiting for a gap and i wasnt sure what the etiquette was. sorry if these are dumb questions im still figuring all this out.

not dumb questions at all, everyone goes through exactly this when they start out. so the CTCSS thing — basically most repeaters require you to transmit a subaudible tone along with your voice so the repeater knows to open up. without it the repeater just ignores you, which is exactly what youre experiencing. the tone is sometimes called a PL tone depending on who you talk to, same thing just different name. you need to find out what tone that specific repeater uses, usually its listed in the directory entry right next to the frequency and offset. then in your baofeng you go into the menu and set the T-CTCS to that tone value. its a little buried in the menus but once you find it youll be fine.

on the conversation thing — yeah just wait for a pause and then key up and say your callsign. most repeater users are pretty used to someone jumping in between exchanges. you dont need to wait for them to fully finish the whole qso, just a natural break works. some people say just your callsign, some say their callsign and that theyre monitoring, both are fine really.

yeah what he said about the tone. I went through the same thing honestly, felt like I was talking into a void for like a week before someone told me. one thing i'll add — some repeaters also have a carrier squelch mode where they dont require a tone at all, but those are getting pretty rare these days. most of the linked systems especially, the ones that tie into echolink or the statewide nets, they almost always need the tone set or you just wont get in.

the baofeng menu system is honestly kind of a pain to navigate if you havent used chirp yet. if you havent, look into it, you can program all that stuff way easier from a computer and it saves a lot of headaches with those radios